I was trying to get my ks0108 based lcd working on my legacy free Abit IT-7max, so i got me a pci parallel card to connect it. It wouldn't work, i threw the lcd in a drawer of my desk until today. I got me another mobo with an onboard parallel port, and within 2 hours i had the lcd working properly.

Now i checked the settings for the pci card and the i/o ranges were quite different from the ones on the new mobo. I then contacted the manufacturer of the pci card asking if I could change thes values to the rights ones and this is the answer i got:

"In order to be compatible with most software, our PCI Products and Drivers will attempt to "Re-Map" the I/O Addresses used back to Legacy (ISA type) values.
We are able to do this in:
DOS, Windows-95, Windows-98 and Windows-me.
Unfortunately, we are NOT able to Re-Map in:
Windows-NT, Windows-2000 and Windows-xp.
When the Re-Mapping is not permitted, the device must use the Addresses
assigned by the PCI System at Boot-Up.
The Re-Mapping only affects the I/O Addresses.
The IRQ used by the device is assigned by the PCI System, and can NOT be changed.
If the software application (or Driver) expects the Port to use Legacy
resources, it will probably not be possible to make it work with a PCI based Port."

So, is it possible to make adjustments in lcdinfo to have it use other legacy resources (like i/o range 8c00-8c07 \ i/o range 9000-9007) ?

I tried the four i/o numbers from my previous post, but no go. The pci port itselfs seems to work ok since i attached a printer to it and that works. Only thing that happens on the lcd are some pixels lighting up or dimming randomly on each reboot

Oh, you could try a USB parallel adapter. Not sure if anyone has done this yet, but it might be a option. I have one I use for a color laser and it works fine. So it must be behaving like a standard parallel port. Just a thought.

Using a USB to parallel adapter most likely isn't going to be very easy. Usually drivers for those only make it show as a printer port in windows and the port doesn't have address (like 0x378 for example) that could be used from other programs.

I have looked at the datasheets of the chips used in these converters and they look like they could be used to connect parallel lcds to usb port but someone would need to write drivers for them. I have one converter here waiting but I'm not sure if I ever have time to start studying this.

I don't have any experience with PCI parallel cards but maybe they also have problems like this ? Is there anyone who would have been succesfull in using PCI parallel cards with lcds ?

I had the same problem with a pci-parallel card and LCDInfo. It cost me many hours of searching the internet and trying to change the IO-adresses of the pci-card but nothing helped. Until I found the source of LCDInfo V3.0 on this website. After compiling it I found the problem immediatly! The error is in de function that gets the settings for the KS108-display. The BASE-adress which you have to enter in the LCDINFO.INI-file doesn't have any effect due to this bug:

void cKS0108::GetSettings(void){ DATA= BASE;//0x378; CONTROL=DATA+2;}

As you can see here DATA (the address of your parallel port) is overwritten with the value 0x378 (mostly LPT1). I have changed it so it copies the BASE-address that was read from the INI-file. Now you have to find the correct IO-address and put this in the INI. You will have to find the IO-address of the Multifunction-card in the Device Manager (for me it was 0xA400) and now it works perfectly!!

This one is coming because in the screen ini file it tries to read a line from g:\projects\lcd_info\error.txt file but of course you don't have it. You can remove this by editing the screen ini file. Like I mentioned these 0.4 versions weren't meant to be publicly released so the ini files include some stuff that might not work for everyone.